BIGFOOT YETI and THE LAST NEANDERTHAL (GENETICIST BRYAN SYKES BIGFOOT PROJECT): ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

  

What an adventure! 

9The author of The Seven Daughters of Eve and other books about

what DNA proves to us decided to go on a scientific quest for the creature known as Bigfoot or Yeti, and that quest takes him to the Pacific Northwest, to Russia, and to the Himalayan Mountains - if not on foot himself, then in interacting with the witnesses and other scientists on the same quest. And as I felt in reading his other books, this man as an author knows how to take his reader along with him, as he seriously questions, sometimes believes, but holds to the science.

One the word was out, Sykes received at least a hundred hair samples that people who had sightings collected, some recently, some long held, and first using microscopes to determine that the hair was a hair, they tested the best 37.  And the result was...

Suspense is killing you, I know!

That none of them proved to be of an unknown creature.  Most were bears, canine, or deer.  However the focus was on DNA from hair, that doesn't exactly mean the quest is over.  Russian scientists are particularly hopeful.

Some scientists examine footprints and what happens to them in the snow melt.

Some track down human anomalies.

And if you want to know what is supposed to attract them, well, leave out green crisp apples and some chocolate!

OK, there is never going to be a genealogy that takes you all the way back to a Neanderthal.  However, there are people alive whose DNA is very rare, especially for where they are living, and the story about the "wild woman," will intrigue you.

As you read this book, you'll remind  yourself that even scientists of Sykes caliber are human.

C 2019-2025 Ancestry Worship Genealogy - BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE : BRYAN SYKES : EXCERPT

C 2001 Bryan Sykes
Norton Publishers

page 190-191 on Y chromosomes (passed on my males) and prolific males

..."It's true that there have been some particularly prolific males. The world record holder is Moulay Ismail, Emperor of Morocco, who is alleged to have had 700 sons (so presumably as many daughters) by the time he was 49 in 1721. He died in 1727 - so there was another six years to have some more. The most prolific woman comes way behind this. She is Mrs. Feodora Vassilyev, a Russian woman who produced sixty-nine children between 1725 and 1765. They were all multiple births - sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four lots of quadruplets - so she was a remarkable woman in that respect as well. The capacity f women to produce large numbers of children is limited by their biology which restricts then to one pregnancy a year at most. Men, on the other hand, are not on a restricted by this timetable and can, in theory, have thousand of children. But the fantasy of enormously prolific males seeding the entire world, thereby reducing the diversity of Y chromosomes by their prodigious feats of polygamy, turned out to be just that. Fantasy. A hard slog in laboratories around the world over the past ten years has found that there are plenty of mutations on the Y chromosome after all..."

BRYAN SYKES DNA USA : SO GLAD I READ THE BOOK! WHAT I LEARNED

Earlier I mentioned reading the latest Bryan Sykes was on my agenda. Well, I read it, and it was a terrific book, at once a travel adventure by a British man first time across the USA by train, as well as what I've come to expect from Sykes; a DNA adventure.

One of the most interesting things I learned about DNA is that these day's science can tell you that your liver came from your African DNA (and the tribe) while your heart came from European (Celtic maybe). As a result, medicine may some day be more accurate in prescribing medications or treatments based on genetics that may not be obvious looking at you.

Something else I learned was more relevant to GENEALOGY. You see, proving Native American ancestry is something that so many people want to do these days. Used to be that people hid their "Indian" heritage for many reasons, including discrimination. Sykes takes about the willingness of many Americans - White and Black - who want to find out if the family rumors are true. Others, however, are sure they do not want DNA tests because... well because it might prove they do not have enough Native American ancestry to retain their tribal rights, especially to casino money.

In one case a tribe threw out a couple hundred members who were African American, these people took the test and came out between 6% and 30% native American. However, Sykes points out, the remaining members of the tribe don't want to take the same test and find out they are also less than entitled.

Over all, this was a terrific book.

I highly recommend it, and hope to find the time to read all the previous books he's written about the subject!

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE : BRYAN SYKES : EXCERPT : HOW TO BE A CLAN MOTHER?

Page 197-198-199

"There are a few qualifications you needed to be a clan mother. The first is that you needed to have daughters. ... A woman who had only sons could not be a clan mother because her children would never pass on the mitochondrial DNA they received from her, so that is the first rule. The second is that you had to have at least two daughters. ... The clan mother is the most recent maternal ancestor that all the members of a clan have n common. Imagine a clan with ten million living members and imagine that we knew perfectly from the registry of births, marriages, and deaths exactly how they are all related. As we went back in time, generation by generation, we would see the maternal lines slowly joining up. The lines in brothers and sisters would converge,. after just one generation, in their mother. After two generations, cousins would converge on their maternal grandmother, their mother's mother. Three generations ago it would be the second cousins whose lines coalesced in their maternal great -grandmothers. And so on. At each generation there would be fewer and fewer people in the clan who had maternal descendants living today. Eventually, hundreds or even thousands of generations ago, there would be only two women in the clan who could claim to have maternal descendants living in the twenty-first century. Further back still, the maternal lines of these two women would converge on a single woman - the true clan mother. And to be in that position she must have had not one but two daughters. ...

A clan mother did not have to be the only woman around at the time and she certainly wouldn't have been. But she is the only one who is connected through this unbroken maternal thread right through to the present day... lines died out..."

C 2001 Bryan Sykes Norton Publishers

I'm saving up to have my DNA done. I want to do the test that takes you back only 3 generations, just to see if a rumor about my heritage is true. The DNA test that takes you all the way back to the CLAN MOTHER is a different test. I sure hope that someday I can do that one too... DNA testing is going down in price (slowly) while the databases expand and increase our potential knowledge rapidly.

SAXONS VIKINGS AND CELTS by BRYAN SYKES

Were the first inhabitants of Britain a race of Giants under Albion, a son of the sea-god Poseidon, who had a band of fifty women, who had all killed their husbands?

What is myth and legend but doesn't hold up when science pays its part in recreating the human story? Bryan Sykes's SAXONS, VIKINGS, and CELTS, is the result of DNA testing over 10,000 people living in the British Isles. Here you will learn that:

The blue tattooed Picts were Celtic too.

The LeTene style, now most strongly associated with Celtic Art, began not on the Atlantic ocean costs but in view of the Alps, and when there was a mass migration it was not by land but by sea, following the Mediterranean, around the Iberian peninsula and north.

That the evidence for the Viking's plundering is there, but also there is the evidence that the Vikings brought along some Viking women to procreate with.

The Genghis Khan effect is that 8 percent of men in Mongolia have inherited this gene because Genghis style was to kill all the men and inseminate all the women. But the term is also used when scientists find that a man or clan or group of men dominated the women. (Some fertile men never got to mate.)

That a few surnames show that all men in the clan show a DNA signature; you could find this signature elsewhere and know without a doubt what CLAN. Are you a Macdonald, McDougall, or Macalister? 200,000 men carry these genes, originated with a man named Somerled, a Celtic hero who helped drive away the Vikings.

Your blood type is associated with your DNA. The cause is very slight changes in the DNA of the blood group itself.

As with the Seven Daughters of Eve, the book he published years earlier, as a writer Sykes will warm you up before he delivers the information, so that the myths and legends are understood first. This book was published by Norton in 2006... so it also stands as the state of the art book on DNA use for genealogy at that time.

Now I want to ask Sykes if there is any way he can get DNA from the lone woman who was found in Los Angeles' LaBrea Tar Pits, where thousands of animal bones have been found!

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE : BRYAN SYKES : DNA USA : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE by BRYAN SYKES 

I recently attended a short but intense lecture on the state of the art in DNA genealogy. One of the books mentioned was Bryan Sykes "The Seven Daughters of Eve."

The lecturer said that all women in Europe (actually about 98%) can be traced to one of seven great mothers who have given them a distinctive DNA identity. I was fascinated, so I read the book ASAP. The book was first published in 2001, and the author has another book coming out called "DNA USA."

First "The Seven Daughters of Eve" is exciting enough and novelesque enough to be a page turner. Without getting heavily into technology Sykes takes you where he went, to getting ancient DNA out of the skeletons of Cheddar Man and other archaeological discoveries and then to the discoveries that he is genetically related to the Russian Tsar's family that was assassinated back in 1918, and that the butler of a friend of his was a direct descendant of Cheddar Man.

Let me explain that Sykes is not saying there were never more than these 7 women. What he is saying is that these 7 women are the ones whose DNA has survived thousands of years to today, as traceable from mother to mother. The other women's DNA does not appear because they had no children, had only one daughter, had only sons, or possibly because over those thousands of years only descendants of women with the best DNA for survival won out. The focus here is on European DNA.

I'm linking to information on Sykes USA DNA.

Here's some of the information within it:

• Of Americans whose ancestors came as slaves, virtually all have some European DNA.

• Racial intermixing appears least common among descendants of early New England colonists.

• There is clear evidence of Jewish genes among descendants of southwestern Spanish Catholics.

• Among white Americans, evidence of African DNA is most common in the South.

• European genes appeared among Native Americans as early as ten thousand years ago.

C 2012-2025  Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights